A clinical trial is an extremely complicated undertaking. The process normally involves multiple iterations of each stage in the planning, design, execution, and analysis cycle for pharmaceutical development because negative data about the safety or efficacy of the pharmaceutical product will require reformulation, which will then necessitate subsequent small scale trials before larger trials may be attempted.
Before beginning a clinical trial, a significant amount of time and effort is spent in designing the trial. Due to the effort and expense of conducting the trial, it is critical that the trial be designed to be as effective and efficient as possible. This involves gathering and analyzing a large amount of information. Prior art systems attempted to deal with this problem by maintaining information regarding the design of a trial in a multiplicity of documents, such as spreadsheets and word processing documents. However, this approach had problems. For example, if information was captured in one source and needed to be transferred to another source, this had to be done manually. This led to wasted effort, expense, and increased opportunities for errors.